Faye Greener is first described in detail in Chapter 11, at her first meeting with Homer Simpson. "Although she was seventeen, she was dressed like a child of twelve in a white cotton dress with a blue sailor collar. Her long legs were bare and she had blue sandals on her feet" (281). Faye is dressed as though she were a girl of twelve, and yet she is the sexual desire of both Homer Simpson and Tod Hackett in the novel. Are both men pedophiles? It is not clear whether or not 17 was above the legal age of consent at the time, but either way, it is not hard to say that this whole situation is wrong. Whether Faye can legally consent to sex or not is irrelevant; she is a little girl who is being longed after by men, men who know that she is a little girl. She is dressed up to look like a twelve year old by her father not to protect her innocence or keep her out of the sight of men, but because twelve year old girls were the epitome of female sexuality. And apparently, according to West, that works.
Today, this seems easy enough to believe, if not slightly exaggerated, because it is a fact in our culture that beauty = youth. Consider the popularity of Botox, facelifts, and plastic surgery, especially in Hollywood. However, what seems to be more alarming, then, is not the effort to make Faye look younger and more attractive, but the other individuals that are forced to fit into this mold.
In Chapter 19, we meet Adore. He has supposedly run off from his mother, and while she goes looking for him, she meets Tod and Homer (what a coincidence that Tod has connections in the film industry!). After the adults have sufficiently finished their conversation, Adore wanders out from behind the garage, "dragging behind him a small sailboat on wheels. He was about eight years old, with a pale, peaked face and a large, troubled forehead.... His eyebrows had been plucked and shaped carefully" (334). Tod, great intellectual observer that he is, understands immediately what Adore's mother is trying to accomplish with him. After all, "What's Shirley Temple got that he ain't got?" (333) she asks. When he asks Adore to sing for them, he complies at the urging of his mother, singing "Mama Doan Wan' No Peas." Though the song is mature in some of its contents, dealing with alcohol and sex, "He seemed to know what the words meant, or at least his body and his voice seemed to know. When he came to the final chorus, his buttocks writhed and his voice carried a top-heavy load of sexual pain" (336). Maybelle Loomis, Adore's mother, understands the model that Hollywood is putting out at the time of what makes a star, and that is a sexy 12-year-old girl. The fact that she has an 8-year-old boy doesn't stop her from trying to mold him into the star-image, utterly exploiting him. Shirley Temple, after all, is the biggest star of the time, so she knows that if she makes her son into Shirley Temple, she can reap some of the benefits herself.
This can also be seen in a series of movies made at the time, called Baby Burlesques, in which regular movies were refilmed using toddlers in all the roles. All the children in the movies wore diapers with over-sized safety pins, but otherwise acted as the adults did. Three-year-old Shirley Temple was a star in these films. In this film, called War Babies, she is immediately sexualized:
One of the reasons that Nathanael West's novel is so interesting is because the critiques he offers are not limited to Hollywood in the 1930s. It would be easier to read the novel that way, not having to acknowledge that the world he presents is still the world we live in today. Unfortunately, the sexy Shirley Temple of War Babies still exists today:
West's novel was a critique of Hollywood in the 1930s, but it is clear that everything he wrote about is still relevant today, if not even more so. And if we're OK with that, the result could be even worse than a little boy getting his head stomped into the ground...
Faye Greener and Adore
Faye Greener is first described in detail in Chapter 11, at her first meeting with Homer Simpson. "Although she was seventeen, she was dressed like a child of twelve in a white cotton dress with a blue sailor collar. Her long legs were bare and she had blue sandals on her feet" (281). Faye is dressed as though she were a girl of twelve, and yet she is the sexual desire of both Homer Simpson and Tod Hackett in the novel. Are both men pedophiles? It is not clear whether or not 17 was above the legal age of consent at the time, but either way, it is not hard to say that this whole situation is wrong. Whether Faye can legally consent to sex or not is irrelevant; she is a little girl who is being longed after by men, men who know that she is a little girl. She is dressed up to look like a twelve year old by her father not to protect her innocence or keep her out of the sight of men, but because twelve year old girls were the epitome of female sexuality. And apparently, according to West, that works.
Today, this seems easy enough to believe, if not slightly exaggerated, because it is a fact in our culture that beauty = youth. Consider the popularity of Botox, facelifts, and plastic surgery, especially in Hollywood. However, what seems to be more alarming, then, is not the effort to make Faye look younger and more attractive, but the other individuals that are forced to fit into this mold.
In Chapter 19, we meet Adore. He has supposedly run off from his mother, and while she goes looking for him, she meets Tod and Homer (what a coincidence that Tod has connections in the film industry!). After the adults have sufficiently finished their conversation, Adore wanders out from behind the garage, "dragging behind him a small sailboat on wheels. He was about eight years old, with a pale, peaked face and a large, troubled forehead.... His eyebrows had been plucked and shaped carefully" (334). Tod, great intellectual observer that he is, understands immediately what Adore's mother is trying to accomplish with him. After all, "What's Shirley Temple got that he ain't got?" (333) she asks. When he asks Adore to sing for them, he complies at the urging of his mother, singing "Mama Doan Wan' No Peas." Though the song is mature in some of its contents, dealing with alcohol and sex, "He seemed to know what the words meant, or at least his body and his voice seemed to know. When he came to the final chorus, his buttocks writhed and his voice carried a top-heavy load of sexual pain" (336). Maybelle Loomis, Adore's mother, understands the model that Hollywood is putting out at the time of what makes a star, and that is a sexy 12-year-old girl. The fact that she has an 8-year-old boy doesn't stop her from trying to mold him into the star-image, utterly exploiting him. Shirley Temple, after all, is the biggest star of the time, so she knows that if she makes her son into Shirley Temple, she can reap some of the benefits herself.
This can also be seen in a series of movies made at the time, called Baby Burlesques, in which regular movies were refilmed using toddlers in all the roles. All the children in the movies wore diapers with over-sized safety pins, but otherwise acted as the adults did. Three-year-old Shirley Temple was a star in these films. In this film, called War Babies, she is immediately sexualized:
One of the reasons that Nathanael West's novel is so interesting is because the critiques he offers are not limited to Hollywood in the 1930s. It would be easier to read the novel that way, not having to acknowledge that the world he presents is still the world we live in today. Unfortunately, the sexy Shirley Temple of War Babies still exists today:
...And so do Adore and his mother .
West's novel was a critique of Hollywood in the 1930s, but it is clear that everything he wrote about is still relevant today, if not even more so. And if we're OK with that, the result could be even worse than a little boy getting his head stomped into the ground...